That didn’t go as planned.
Libera Te
Elon Musk paid a visit to the US-Mexico border on Thursday evening, but his attempt to livestream the occasion on his platform Twitter-now-known-as-X didn’t quite go as planned.
The centi-billionaire has reignited his obsession with immigration as of late, promising earlier this week to visit the Texas border town of Eagle Pass “to see what’s going on for myself.”
Wearing a black stetson — correctly, a hat expert says— and mirrored aviators, and standing in front of a formation of similarly garbed guys with their thumbs in their pockets and their hips tilted forward, Musk kicked off his livestream by promising to show his followers the “unfiltered” and “real story.”
But barely four minutes in, the video aburptly froze and the entire livestream crashed, raining on Musk’s parade.
Behind the scenes, tech reporter Ryan Mac reports that minutes later, Musk sent a brief company-wide email.
“Please fix this,” he implored.
Musk’s broadcast wouldn’t resume for over half an hour.
Citizen Journalist
Ironically, just moments before the stream broke, Musk worried aloud that he would have so many viewers that the stream would crash. It had around 500,000 viewers at the time.
But as Mac notes, this has been a common excuse of Musk’s for many of his livestreams. You could say he doesn’t sound very confident in his own platform’s infrastructure — and, well, why should he? By all accounts, it’s crumbling.
Of course, this isn’t the first time Musk has made questionable demands of his ill-treated Twitter employees, like when he sent engineers a “high urgency” email at two in the morning because President Joe Biden’s Superbowl tweet got more engagement than his.
Following the visit, Musk harped on about “citizen journalism,” promoting his platform as a place for “more on-the-ground reporting from regular citizens,” which he claims will “will change the world.”
It’s certainly a strange tune to be singing now, though, considering his hostility to journalists on the platform and his propensity for tweeting out conspiracies.
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